Overclocking
*make sure you turn off AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet before attempting any sort of overclock*
AMD provides a great tool for overclocking your graphics card and it’s part of the Catalyst Control Center that you get with your drivers. I didn’t spend a lot of time overclocking this card, but I did test to see how it did maxed out. AMD lets me overclock it to a whopping 960MHz core bus and up to 1425MHz. After doing this my machine became very unstable. I was able to find a decent stable over clock at 900MHz (Core )and 1303 MHz (memory), though I think with better cooling you could get it higher (or even just messing with each part individually). Like I said, I did not spend a lot of time trying to find the best overclock I could get. I brought it to the max for funsies, and then found a good, stable overclock. Here are the results:
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| 3DMark 11 Performance | 3DMark 11 EXTREME |
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| Luxmark | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 |
Not much of an improvement in the synthetic benchmarks, but a nice 15% improvement where it counts: gaming. This is most likely due to the RAM overclock since games are swapping so much data around. The synthetic scores only got about a 2-5% increase in performance with a 5% overclock.
Conclusion
Overall, the Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon 6770 1GB GDDR5 is a very fast card, especially for it’s price. If you are looking to upgrade your card from a 4000 series ATI or a lower Nvidia card you are in for a treat. I went from an Nvidia GTS450 to this and there was a noticeable improvement. If you are thinking about upgrading coming from a 5700 series card or something like an Nvidia 460, you might want to save your money, or go for a 6800 series card or a something similar from Nvidia. This is a mid-range card. Borderline budget card too for the price, but for the performance you’d think different. Overall this proved to be a great card, and I would definitely recommend for anyone looking for a cheap upgrade.
